


Oxygen

by apiphile



Series: the end of mr eames [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, F/M, Paris (City), Rain, bottling out of sex scenes, break-up, eames is chubby, holy fuck it's het, poorly-expressed feelings, screw your fanon the man is not a sex ninja, smashing popular ships with the heel of my bitch boots, stealth-dominant, yes i said "clitoris"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-30
Updated: 2010-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:01:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Continuation of "Nails & Rope" (http://archiveofourown.org/works/122057), prequel to Burial (http://archiveofourown.org/works/148183).</p><p>Eames and Ariadne come to an agreement, eventually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oxygen

They navigate, by mutual consumption, the better part of a few more bottles of less impressive wine in a less impressive establishment, where an MC is demonstrating for a small group of presumable-friends the latest heights to which his craft has climbed; these are stolen almost wholesale from MC Solaar without much in the way of alterations.

"I thought we were going home," Eames says, his shirt unbuttoned well below the throat, his tie in his pocket, and his jacket spread in an ungainly and overheating sweep over his knees – he'll only forget it if he leaves it over the back of the chair. He feels very old and absurdly young all at once, but most of all rather drunk.

"Saying you're not at home in a bar?" Ariadne chides, from the shadows. She has her scarf wound around her hand like the bulky binding of some child playing at boxers, and despite the darkness he can see flashes of her ghostly throat in the strained light from the far window; it almost glows against her blood-dark shirt, against the poster-strafed wall. She sounds drunker than he; whether this is merely the deceit of voice remains to be learned.

He could say _I'm at home wherever you are_ but it would be the lie of a flatterer and he's not drunk enough; he is agitated and guilty wherever she is, which is not "at home" even for a man whose idea of the phrase has been recreated in Frankensteinian lumps from the happier and unhappier memories of marks, mentors, and old lovers, from musicals, books, and films.

He shrugs instead.

"I'm waiting for it to rain again," she says, when he doesn't answer. She's drunk too, definitely, a thin crust of blackish wine delineating the place where her lips meet whenever she opens her mouth; the lipstick she scrubbed away hours ago, leaving him to gaze in boozy fascination at their naked stripes as if at a peep show.

"I can come up with _other_ cheesy lines that don't involve you being soaked to the bone," he assures her, "I know –" he swallows a poorly-timed belch, "– a lot of them. Thousands. Of awful lines."

Ariadne treats him to a wine-softened variant on the gimlet stare, an unfocussed lesser cousin. "Stop it."

Even presented with the opportunity, it's impossible to explain the compulsive sleaziness, the blurting of inferred self-deprecation, the unfunny jokes, as nervousness. He is quite beyond nerves or confidence, cruising in a merlot-scented sea of bleary terror and disbelief while the wielder of the red thread takes her time psyching herself up. At the other end of the bar, under the window, two stick-thin girls kiss without enthusiasm and with a mouldy fur coat wrapped around the both of their shoulders like a shield from the world.

"Okay," she says, to an unasked and unthought question, and she gets to her feet in a jerk, holding out an unsteady hand: for balance, to beckon him, for him to take – he doesn't know. "Let's go, then."

She leans into his side as the regrouping clouds hiccough a fresh handful of rain onto them – sun breaks through them in weary patches, and rainbows lurk at every corner. Ariadne's feet twitch droplets from their rubber toes on every second step in little deliberate flicks, and she takes his arm as if they're some ancient couple in the twilight of their doddering grey lives, steadying herself on his unsteadiness.

Eames tips his head until his cheek touches her damp, smoked hair, nearly falls over. "May I kiss you?"

"No." She brushes hair behind her ear that needed no such replacement, but does not dislodge him. "Not yet."

He revels, briefly, in the 'yet'.

They circumnavigate a magnitudenous puddle with the measured steps of the consciously-pissed, and for a moment she treads on his foot, stumbles, and nearly knocks them both into the wall.

Her fingers knife into his bicep, struggling to retain verticality, and Eames observes with the appropriate gravitas, "I think we may be drunk," elbowing the brickwork harder than a sober Eames might, levering them both upright.

"Good," says Ariadne, but she won't elaborate.

"A taxi?" he suggests. His legs are sagging under the weight of the wine, the weight of himself, and the little additional weight of her, although he's willing to concede (as wet light bathes them both in unfamiliar hues, and someone on the other side of the street shouts something he cannot hear well enough to interpret on his rusty, crusty, inefficient GCSE French) that the weight he thinks he's labouring under is mostly in his mind.

"No," she steps aside without grace as a cyclist clips some standing water in the gutter, drenching both herself and one side of Eames and merely spattering Ariadne with a few lingering muddy drops. "We can walk, can't we? While we still have legs."

It is an oddly old-fashioned thing to say, and for a moment he has no come-back. "Didn't have _you_ pegged for a maudlin drunk." He waits for the slap, the balled-up fist smacking into his upper arm in reprimand, but to his disappointment there is nothing of the sort.

She says, "I suppose we're both full of surprises," without rancour, but he can't help flinching all the same.

"Should I say I'm sorry?" he asks, more to the imaginary audience to whom he usually performs his miniature dramas than to her. Their absence from this conversation had, up until now, been one of his favourite things about it; but now, of course, he needs the response to gauge his contrition correctly. A library of reactions the size of the moon occupies his mind, torn from films and paperbacks and every single argument he's ever observed, but none of those people with their tears and their recriminations were Ariadne.

"Only if you are."

"Do you want me to be sorry?"

She chews on her lip, and there is no reply until they reach the end of the street. "I left my umbrella somewhere."

* * *

The window is still open when they return, his cactus looking none the worse for wear, though it is swimming in its saucer and will probably rot if nothing is done about this soon. The rug from the window to the table is a swamp, and it squelches as Ariadne crosses it to shove his tiny, sad little plant out of the line of fire.

She pushes the pathetic plastic pot a little too far to one side and leaves it dangling on the edge of the windowsill; an errant gust of wind from the fading light of the street (as the first of the street lights rouses itself with an inaudible ping of orange light) finishes the job, a stripe of cheap potting compost spraying out over the boards as the cactus suicides.

When he looks up from the plant carnage she puts her hand on his sternum.

"Will you lie about this, too?" The line of wine in the centre of her mouth sits like an instruction, an invitation, and he'd erase it with his tongue if she'd just let him.

"I will have to lie to _some_ people," he says, aiming for honesty and only managing to hit coyness; he's so used to shooting shy of the underlying facts that getting there proves impossible. He puts his hand over hers, but she wriggles out from under his grasp and brushes him off so that she can return her fingers to the same spot unmolested.

"You mean Arthur."

Her hand stays where it is; he puts his hands into his pockets slowly, as if moving at speed will knock her away. They'll be safer in his pockets, where the urge to reach out and tap the tips of her fingers won't overwhelm him so much. The light in the room sneaks surreptitiously below 'too low'.

"Did you _tell_ him where you were going?" she asks when he doesn't answer.

"He didn't ask," Eames says. It's the single most facetious thing he could have said, it's not what he meant to say, and he knows when she jerks her mouth to one side in a rictus of indecisiveness and disapproval that he's not going to get the answer right by stabbing drunkenly at an army of stock phrases until one of them unlocks a smile. "He gave me the money, and I went."

She sighs as if he's just started singing something terrible, and her fingers twitch against his chest. For a second he thinks she's trying to determine the truth by listening to the beat of his heart, but he has too much respect for her intelligence to really believe she'd think something so stupid. "God." She sniffs. "Please stop making it sound like prostitution."

"I –" he almost laughs at that. "Nothing of the sort. I told you, I was in the way, he told me to stop fucking up his business with my presence, I said I couldn't afford to go anywhere else and he rectified the situation."

"Just like that?" and there, she holds his gaze again so intently in spite of the slight unfocussing of her eyes that he wants to look away, to pretend this is just some stupendous game he's enjoying playing with her head.

"Just like that," he agrees, instead. "I don't know what else you want me to say."

"The truth?" It's so sarcastic that he knows she won't believe anything he offers her, not now.

"Uh-huh." He waits until the loud thing passing outside has Dopplered its way out of immediate ear-buggery range and says with a sickly shadow of a smirk, "I thought you'd established that my relationship with this nebulous and indefinable concept is at best –"

" _Eames_ don't _do_ that."

The loud thing outside either takes another turn around the block or reverses back the way it's come, aggressively-popping engine and fountain of Gallic invective together rising in the wet evening air. He can barely see the far side of the room, and he wonders how evening fell so fast on the conversation.

"Does he know you're here?" She crunches up a handful of his drying shirt cotton in her fingers, looking neither at it nor at him, and presses the heel of her hand to the bridge of her nose as if she's holding in a headache or a nosebleed. "Does he know what you're doing?"

 _Bang_ , says the engine outside. Eames squints against the low light; it's a familiar gesture but for the moment his wine-and-panic-addled brain won't tease it from this context into its proper place, and the decay of his abilities both frustrates and worries him.

"You're not asking the right question," he says thickly, looking down at her fingers. They look cold, a suggestion of purple under the nails. It might just be the light.

"He is my _friend_ ," Ariadne says, placing such emphasis on the word that he wants to step backward and keep stepping backward until he's out of the door. "What would you do in my – no, don't answer that. You don't understand how people –"

"No I think I really _do_ understand how people work," he half-snaps. "It's my sort of my job."

"Fine." She releases his shirt and smoothes it flat again almost absently. "Then you don't understand _why_ they work. I'm not – you can't just –"

"He doesn't know because it isn't his business to know and he doesn't care," Eames trots the words out like seeds spat into the earth. "I told you, it's not a matter of _how I'm terribly betraying_ the Human bloody Robot, it's not _like_ that, I started out trying to waste a little time in attractive company and it turned into the living entombment without anyone ever asking _me_ what I thought we were doing."

 _putt-putt-putt_ outside now, some scooter-based rescue for the person with the miserable motorcar, perhaps. Another downpour begins as abruptly as if a tap has been spun in the sky, and in a flurry of almost-invisible movement a pigeon quits the windowsill. Eames breathes out a breath he feels he's been holding for a month, a year.

"And if I ask you again tomorrow will you say the same thing?" She sways, unconsciously using him as a prop.

"Not if I'm sober." He licks his lips, but he can't feel it at all.

She tips her head back too far too look up at him properly. "Stop calling him the Human Robot."

"I can change to The Alien From Newark if you prefer," he offers, tentatively. It's as much a reflex as a genuine joke, but she rolls her eyes and some of the vicious constriction in his chest he'd barely realised was there lifts its coils, python-like, to let him breathe a small sigh of relief.

Ariadne shoves him lightly in the sternum and he stumbles backward, confused until he sees the look in her eyes; the sofa is too far away to break a convincing fall, but he contrives a tripping half-step as if he is trying to regain his balance, and flops in what could hardly be construed as a sexy manner on the creaking cushions.

"I bought that because it reminded me of you," she says, apparently out of nowhere. Eames continues to sprawl; Ariadne holds her hair out of her own face as if she's about to vomit, which does not exactly fill him with confidence.

"… Really?" is the best he can come up with. He reaches for the lamp switch by his head without thinking.

With the injection of golden light into the room, everything is transformed. There is a spider on the ceiling; Ariadne's drafts are safely-tucked in a plastic artist's folder; his cactus is still lying discarded in the puddle the window as admitted, but he can see his dear Architect's face properly again and it makes things clearer in so very many ways. The low-wattage bounces off something in her eyes that makes his entire body shiver slowly, a frisson-inducing darkness in their depths that has nothing to do with shadows.

"It's belonged to a lot of people already," she says, swaying on her feet again. He extends his hands to beckon her almost automatically. "It doesn't go with anything I have, it's uncomfortable."

He can't help smiling at that. "I can see the similarity."

Belying the gentle side-to-side vacillation of her body, she is at the sofa at admirable speed, standing between his knees, her hands flat on his chest – or as flat as they can be on something which could probably, Eames admits without shame, fill an A-cup at present.

"I want to keep it anyway," she says.

"Oh," he says, because it's all he can squeeze out of his mouth.

She leans on him harder, as if she knows there are more words trapped inside him that could bubble out like methane from a swamp, squashing his chest into his ribs, his ribs into his lungs. "Oh."

"You want to keep it anyway," he repeats, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender, careful to keep from touching her wrists, her arms, anything that he might cling to and find himself suddenly unable to let go of.

She bends over until her nose is almost touching his. "Is that clear?"

He offers her a smile that shows just the tip of his tooth. "I'm not sure I follow you, Ms Ariadne, could you perhaps –"

A faint impression that something has blown in the window – a leaf, a moth, fuck it, a pigeon for all he cares – is all Eames is afforded before, as he knew she would, Ariadne puts her mouth over his and kisses him with the kind of determination and partial drunkenness that liquefies both his spine and any thought of smart remarks.

Considering it safe to do so or unable to think why he shouldn't any more – after all, she is _kissing him_ – he clutches at her shoulders as if he's in danger of sinking if he lets go, and her body is warm and small and above his like a roof protecting him from the rain. Which is insane; the rain is outside and – and she is kissing him, slowly but hard, and he fans out his fingers to meet over her spine.

Her mouth tastes, unsurprisingly, of wine – but he can smell too the skin lotions she uses, the smoke in her hair, and the indefinable scent of Ariadne herself. As their lips touch he holds his eyes open; a blurred vision of close-up skin pores and fine hairs until she puts her palm over his eyes and kisses him harder in the hot red darkness of blood beneath her thin skin.

He keeps his eyes open against her hand, sure that if she feels his eyelashes brush her, if she feels them close, she will take her hand away and leave his face naked; Ariadne cups his unshaven chin between her thumb and forefinger and tips his head back, pressure on his forehead, to kiss him harder. To kiss him until she is sucking the air from his lungs.

Eames inhales through his nose, reluctant to stop kissing her back just because he's in sore need of some air; her mouth is so soft that it is almost ludicrous that it should _hurt_ like this.

She curls her hand until only three fingers cover his eyes, a cursory, symbolic blindfold rather than an effective one. But her remaining finger and her thumb twist around and squeeze his nose shut, and almost immediately Eames feels his heart shudder and shake in answer, in the artificial darkness.

For a moment he can hear nothing but his own pulse, see nothing but a macro shot of her fingers so close that they make no sense, taste nothing but Ariadne's grape-adulterated spit, smell nothing at all – feel nothing but the warmth of her back through her shirt, as he spreads his fingers across it, trying to touch every inch at once.

But she backs away from his mouth for long enough for whisper, "You can't lie when you're not talking, I guess," and there is no way in hell he would dare to correct on her on that; she'll find out soon enough. He bats the thought away and tries to pull her closer; but clothed there's not much closer she can get, her belly touching his through a rucked-up cheap cotton shirt on his part and a demurely-down top on hers. "Breathe."

Eames gulps air the way he used to guzzle smoke in stolen moments when he was already running late – a particular talent of his, to start out early and arrive so late people forgot he was coming at all – and is far from ready for her mouth when it returns. Far from ready but drowning in gratitude; he tugs on her back, daring her to come closer, push harder, shove the life from him.

Ariadne shakes her head, and reaches for his buttons.

Her hair droops around her face in curtains as she dips her head, expression concealed while she wrestles, numb-fingered, with his shirt buttons; Eames lies perfectly passive, gripping her back with encouraging hands as his chest sets up an infernal fluttering that may not even take his corroded and ill-used heart as the epicentre.

When she looks up, throwing his shirt open to lay her hands – cold-fingered and hot-palmed – on his belly as if feeling for a child, her eyes are swimming and her eyelashes glitter.

From under his delirium Eames gives a start of alarm, lifts his hand momently from her back; "Are you –?"

"It's normal," she mutters, making no move to brush them away. Her breath is uneven, and she strokes the hairs on his chest the wrong way, sending electric sparks through the base of his spine. "If you make fun of me for this –"

"I just worried –" he breaks off when she catches his eye. Her cheeks are red, her mouth wet, and there is a tear tracking a snail trail over one hot cheekbone, but she still looks far from distraught. Quite the opposite; the intensity with which she attacks his mouth with hers confirms it. This is some charming accident of physiology he can grow used to, not the tremulous tears of the suddenly regretful.

The sharp tug on his chest hair opens his mouth wider as if a level has been pulled inside him; it's crude and unrefined and lacks the technique of experience, and it makes his nostrils flare and his hips rise awkwardly against her. Naturally she yanks again, chases his tongue, her narrow legs crushing his flanks as if he's some fairground ride; naturally he makes a quiet, unformed sound from his throat into hers and presses his hands flat on the back of her fragile ribcage, feeling the blur of her heart through flesh and clothes.

Of course it is inexperienced. Of course it is rough with awkwardness and not calculated infliction of pain; this is Ariadne, who is not digging her blunt, short, carefully-cut nails into the fat-padded muscle of his breast because she thinks it is the _right_ thing to do, but because it is the thing she cannot help but do.

Eames reaches lower, squeezes the barely-perceptible place where her stomach becomes her hips, and kisses up against her mouth; just to silence his own mind, just to lose himself in her lips. He tries to kid himself that he could live forever on just this, mouth to mouth, a rescue, benediction, and resuscitation all in one. He tries to pretend that there will just be kisses and that will be enough.

He's aware he's being a fucking drama queen again, but that's the trouble with poses like that; sooner or later, they overcome you.

Ariadne pulls the shirt from his shoulders, yanks his arms down from her, and before he can determine whether he's supposed to struggle free or sit still, her mouth is gone and she's tearing at her own top with impatience that he can scarcely believe. It looks brown under this light, and gets tangled in her hair as she wrenches her arms from it.

"Oh, _fuck it_ ," Ariadne mutters, leaving the fabric caught in a lumpy and unsexy headdress. She punches his shoulders with the heels of her hands, knocking him back into the sofa and smearing the smirk on his lips into a real smile, the sorry and ridiculous thing that splits his face in half and exhibits his poor dentistry. She smiles back, tears still overflowing the length of her face. "Don't you fucking laugh at me."

"I'm not laughing," he says, his arms trapped by his sides in a cheap ugly shirt and his mouth ensnared by her smile. "I'm just happy."

She pushes him again, her pubis-beneath-jeans against the lower rise of his belly, and half head-butts him in the face, wet skin against his sweating cheek. "You smell of meat," she says, and hiccups.

"I thought you didn't want me to laugh?"

"Are you okay?" she says, in little more than a whisper, and he hears the unspoken echo, _am I okay?_ in the silence where he can't think of the right answer; all that springs to mind is _I am what you want me to be_ , but they can't go down that path again.

He kisses the end of her nose. "Do I _feel_ okay?"

And of course, she rolls her eyes at this, keeps them both from drowning. "Yes, I'd noticed the erection."

"That _is_ the point of all this, isn't it?"

She strokes the bristles on his throat with the pad of her thumb and it becomes abruptly difficult to comprehend her answer, his blood taking a leap toward the aforementioned. Whatever it is she says ends in a question; he stares at her dull-wittedly until she repeats herself.

She says, "What can I do?", and it takes him another minute to realise the question is not rhetorical; Ariadne's thumb is a small point of cool against his Adam's apple, gently disarranging and rearranging the razor's failings, the re-growth of beard. It does little to collate his thoughts.

"Anything you want."

Sirens pass in the street below; he hears them as if through a thick curtain, though the window's still open and the sound is as loud as if it's beside him. For a moment he fancies he can read her mind, that he can feel the pre-pressure in her hand that will become her thrusting his Adam's apple back into his neck, that he knows exactly what she wants and can sacrifice consciousness for her if she wants; but leaves him as quickly as it arrives.

He's certainly not expecting her to rock back until she's sitting squarely on his crotch and say, very seriously – owl-faced, old-eyed – "No, I want you to ask me. I want you to –" she breaks off and frowns at the air between them, "– I want you to."

"Beg you to?" Eames finishes. He sits as still as he can, as if she's a wild bird that's landed on him unexpectedly, and the slightest twitch will send her flapping away again, spell broken. "I can –"

"No, no, no." Ariadne sighs, digs her fingers into the side of his neck until he's irrationally afraid she'll tear open his jugular, distracted all the time by the weight of her crushing, half-compressing his dick. "I… I want you _you_ to ask me. Not," the words seem to be travelling an immense distance to reach her mouth, "not just put on some, some Eames-suit that fits. Fits this situation."

It isn't fair, Eames thinks childishly, to ask a man to concentrate on this fucking vague concept of _who they really are_ when he's got the woman he may or may not be in love with and is certainly unpleasantly obsessed with sitting on his crotch, when he's drunk and shivering in the depths of his stomach, when she's trussed him up with her own clothes and kissed him dizzy. One can't just expect a chap – _ha_ – to dredge up the lost threads of a lifetime and play himself at such short notice.

So he lies without lying; speaks _a_ truth, even if he's not wholly sure if it's his truth or one he's picked up along the way.

"Please."

"What?"

"Please will you," he closes his eyes, as if _not_ seeing her will make the knowledge that he's making it up as he goes along a little easier to bear. He imagines they're in a film, The Great Love Scene; he remembers that she's wearing her top around her head and nearly chokes on an inappropriate laugh.

"Please will I what?" He can hear the frown even with his eyes shut.

Two syllables, which should not be quite the meal they're turning into in his larynx. Two short, simple syllables that he's not even sure are his. They could be anyone's dirty little secret, purloined in the process of hunting the profitable, coaxed from someone's distracted mouth while dallying in a different bedroom. It shouldn't be this hard.

They're probably not even _his_ words for God's sake.

"Please will I what, Eames?"

He unfolds the syllables carefully from his tongue, forces them past his teeth, and tears the eyelid of one eye back; she is still weeping, red-faced, her hair half-retained in her forgotten clothes and half in disarray around her face.

Ariadne bites her lip without ceremony or affectation – so unlike him in every respect – and says " _Yes_ " from what sounds like the back of her throat.

He is still unprepared for the punch. Eames was perhaps expecting a slap; which is not to say the punch is unwelcome, only shocking. Her hand is small and sharp as a knife blade, and though she's skinny and as muscular as a matchstick there is stopping power – his head ricochets off the wooden rim of the sofa with the force.

Over the singing in his ears and the pain from his face he can hear her breathing hard.

"Like that." It is not quite a question, and he's truly at a loss as to which question it would be.

Eames extends his tongue to taste his own blood as it slides sluggishly over the rim of his upper lip. It tastes the same as always, salt and metal and a sleepily-stirring association of shame. He goes cross-eyed trying to survey the damage, the back of his head aching _warm_ but certainly not split.

So he doesn't see her lean in, only feels her weight shift – pressing the seam of her jeans into the ridge in his trousers, cutting any thoughts short and rerouting them – and the hot wet pressure on his face as she so very gently kisses the blood away again.

He's grateful, then, for the open window and the intermittent rain. Without it he'd catch fire.

"Like that," he echoes, his hands limp.

She nips his lip, another question he's not wholly sure on, another question he doesn't have an 'honest' answer for, not the kind she keeps looking for. He wishes he could stroke helplessly at the unnameable place that joins her spine to her hips, fitting her skeleton together in his mind almost by reflex.

"Come on," Ariadne mutters, and he's no idea if she's talking to him or to herself, but it works; he kisses her, stinging mouth and dribbling nose all, and lifts his hips beneath her.

"Please," he says to her filtrum.

"Again?" she asks his cheek, her hands tracing meaningless patterns across his collarbone, too light and too delicate.

"If you like." If he were a little – alright, a _lot_ – more flexible, he might arch his back, try to push his body into her hands until she takes the hint, slaps and punches, pinches or pulls. Until she does something —

" _Eames_." It is clearly the wrong answer.

"Harder," he suggests. If nothing else, it's an excellent catch-all answer.

" _Think_ ," she sighs, but in her exasperation she digs her fingers into his chest and electrifies his spine just the same; he twitches and slumps – overegging it, perhaps, but she has to know when she's doing it _right_.

"That," he says with exaggerated breathiness, "is rather hard at the moment." He side-steps the potential innuendo with no small degree of regret.

"Do you want to go around in circles forever?"

"… No." And he would swear to himself, if to no one else, that he can see the _finally, a straightforward answer_ in her shoulders, in her skin, even if she chooses not to voice it.

She shakes her head, reaching behind her back. He wants to say 'I'll help' but he can't be sure that she wouldn't prefer him inconvenienced and wrapped up in his shirt, unable to assist and ordered only to watch. It's not even that she's difficult to read, just that with his apparently indomitable hard-on dominating his thoughts it's stopped being so easy to separate his arrogant second-guessing and what he imagines from the signals he's seeing and feeling.

By the time he's finished stumbling around his own head she's slipped her bra onto some unseen ledge, and even the ridiculous spectacle of her temporary headdress can no longer jolt him into laughter; Ariadne is half-naked and golden-lit, her skin pale and her eyes dark as the hair in her armpits as she lifts the top out of her hair at last.

Eames gets half-way to saying _don't_ before he realises that 'because it's all that stands between me and panicking' is the most absurd reason possible. He wrinkles his nose instead as the blood dries beneath it, smeared by her lips but not swept wholly away.

She has small, dark nipples, or the low light makes them seem dark. Her breasts are – he'd laugh if he weren't so desperate to touch them – smaller than his.

"Ariadne." There is no reason for it, he just wants to hear her name in his mouth; she ignores him, and lies over him as if he's a significantly more comfortable sofa, which – again the laughter threatens to bubble up – he supposes he rather is. "Ariadne."

He doesn't catch her reply, mouthed as it is into his neck. His heart is too loud, his skin is too small, and her chest touches his from collar to waist; he couldn't understand a word if they were etched into his brain with a soldering iron. He hopes it's just his name, the name she's chosen for the time being, and not an instruction.

One small hand comes between the banged back of his head and the edge of the sofa, inveigling its way into his hair with tricksy fingers; he leans forward as far as his neck will allow, to leave her room. She thanks him by tugging savagely on the short hairs at the back of his neck.

"Ow," he says under his breath.

Muffled though it is by his sweaty skin and muddied by his mind focussing on the more immediate – her breasts on her narrow chest that fit neatly between his as if they are Russian dolls – he still registers her muttering, "You said harder."

* * *

Despite many years of quips to the contrary, Eames has never yet learned how to breathe through his ears. He struggles to keep his head while giving it, stealing air through the forest of Ariadne's pubic hair.

Her hand is an anchor to the back of his head, directing him –as though he needs direction – with a clenched fist holding hostage a handful of his hair; grinding his face against her whenever he dares come up for breath. Eames presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth, a tiny vacuum applied to her clitoris, and holds the back of Ariadne's knees as if he's losing his balance instead of already given up his internal equilibrium before he even arrived in this city.

* * *

The bed is too narrow for them both, in his opinion, but while Eames kneels on the floor it is the perfect height to rest his face against her thigh. He cannot rest it for long, pulled this way and that by Ariadne's hand in his hair, lifted and repositioned without rhyme or reason beyond the small sounds of pain he makes as his tender scalp is tormented again, and again.

At last she jerks his head back until the shape of his neck is rendered obscene, until she can look him in the eyes with dry eyelashes at last. She pushes her thumb slowly into his lip until the squashed flesh kisses his teeth hard enough to hurt.

"Will you be gone when I wake up?"

"Only," he says with difficulty, leaning very slightly sideways so that he can rest his ear against her stomach, the tip of his nose against the underside for her breasts, "if you want me to be."

Eames fancies he _hears_ the rip in his skin before he feels it, that he tastes the blood flooding his mouth before he knows the sensation of his lower lip tearing under pressure, bursting beneath the ball of her thumb and the jagged lie of his lower teeth, but he knows how often he lies to himself about memories while they're still forming. Perhaps the pain comes first.

"Close your eyes."

She cradles his head like a child, like he's dying. Her lips are a ghost on his cheek that cannot drown out the hurt in his mouth as she drives deeper, pushes the split in his lip back against his serrated mess of so-very-English teeth.

* * *

There are things he feels he should have warned her about; his snoring, which has habitually banished by midnight to whatever sofa, roof, bathroom, or other building is available in order to allow his bedfellows their much-needed rest; there is the question of his infernally high body temperature and inadvertent impression of a very efficient hot-water bottle, which usually end with all the covers wrapped around an indignant bed-sharer and himself perched precariously on the edge of the mattress, trying not to sweat too much; he is confident all of these things will annoy and exasperate as they always do, but for now he lies half-awake with his chin on her clavicle, an arm folded up like a heavily-padded deck-chair over her stomach and hips, and she sleeps without a single twitch or frown.


End file.
